NASA Friday Eye Elon Musk’s SpaceX has a $ 2.9 billion contract to use the spacecraft as a vehicle for the next moon landing. NASA will help fund SpaceX in Central space development, Which was initially thought to be used on trips to Mars and that from 2024 it will also transport astronauts from lunar orbit to the lunar surface.
The Starship is still in development: it will be 50 meters high and 9 meters in diameter, with the ability to transport up to 150 tons of material. at A tender was launched by NASA As part of the Artemis program, it beat the Blue Moon Lander of Blue Origin, a Jeff Bezos subsidiary, and the landing craft proposed by Dynetics, another US company in the competition. The Starship will have to provide two flights: the first unmanned, and the second with astronauts on board.
The Artemis program expects astronauts to reach the moon aboard the Orion space capsule, propelled toward our natural satellite by the Space Launch System (SLS), a large rocket under construction. Once in lunar orbit, Orion will be able to make contact with the Starship, allowing astronauts to reach the moon’s surface. The project is very ambitious especially given the extremely tight deadlines between now and 2024, a deadline that seems unrealistic to most experts.
